A monster stands 200-feet tall in the north end of Valencia, towering over the gray-haired men and women who look up at it in wonder and anger.

“It upsets me every time I drive home, or every time I sit in my backyard to see these on the landscape,” Belcaro resident Brian Smith told a group more than 60 of his neighbors Tuesday at a rally against a series of giant hydro-electric towers being constructed near their homes.

“They overpower everything else,” she said.

The residents of this gated 55-and-up community west of McBean Parkway near Copper Hill Road met at the end of a cul-de-sac on the edge of the hydro right-of-way, to express their displeasure.

“I thought (Southern California) Edison was going to be a good neighbor,” Smith said. “Instead, they put these monsters that dominate our environment.”

The residents showed up with their lawyer.

“I have been retained by some residents to deal with this travesty that Southern California Edison has constructed,” lawyer Hunt C. Braly told a crush of reporters invited to the rally.

“When the residents were notified in April that they were going to put in new poles they provided no notification about the changes to those poles,” he explained.

He said Edison came in secretly, without any public meeting or public discussion and added that the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates Edison, approved the changes.

“And while the commission informed the city (of Santa Clarita) none of the residents were informed,” Braly said.

According to Braly and the handful of residents who spoke emotionally about the towers, had they been notified that the streamline tubular hydro poles would be replaced with 200-foot black scaffolding lattice structures, they never would have allowed Edison to proceed.

Representatives of both the utility and the commission, when contacted by The Signal Monday, refuted claims made by the residents that the two agencies rushed to have the lattice towers put in place.That’s not how the residents see things.

All they see is a string of giant steel structures of latticework that fractures their view of the western sky.Sunsets viewed in Belcaro now come with a net of lines and metal latticework.